C9

AppDynamics gives C9 the application insight to continue delivering business insight to customers

Key Benefits

Real-time business metrics

Application availability, scalability and performance

Performance optimization

Challenge: Needed greater insight into application performance

“We provide predictive insights into the sales pipeline for our customers,” said David Thompson, Vice President of Engineering at C9.

In order to continually fuel this data-driven platform, the company needed greater insight into the performance of its predictive sales applications to ensure they were providing customers with the information they needed when they needed it.

“I think it’s a common situation knowing you have performance improvement opportunities but not really knowing where to start,” said Thompson. “Especially the cases where there's not a consistent problem, being able to pinpoint around when and what was very helpful.” C9 turned to an application performance management (APM) solution to help provide this intelligence.

“One of the things that I've liked about AppDynamics, especially in relation to the competition, is that it requires fairly little overhead and support to run, but it's still able to provide you a viewpoint of the most critical things you should be looking at.”

David Thompson, Vice President of Engineering at C9 Vice President of Engineering, C9

About C9

Companies such as Google, LinkedIn and Pitney Bowes rely on C9’s predictive sales applications to increase revenue, generate more precise forecasts and mitigate pipeline risk. C9 uses data science to answer forward-looking questions like “which deals can I close in the coming quarter,” “how much revenue will I book,” “which reps will exceed quota,” and “what are the proven behaviors that will get more reps to their number.” C9 applications power the predictive sales organization by eliminating surprises and prescribing the actions that accelerate top-line growth.

AppDynamics selected for deep visibility with little overhead

“We're a small company that's trying to focus on improving our product and growing our revenue,” said Thompson. “One of the things that I've liked about AppDynamics, especially in relation to the competition, is that it requires fairly little overhead and support to run, but it's still able to provide you a viewpoint of the most critical things you should be looking at.”

For example, when C9 was periodically experiencing thread deadlocks, “AppDynamics gave us that visibility, and highlighted where the issue was,” said Thompson. “Then we were able to correlate that to a known third party library bug.” He added, “Another example is that we've used the AppDynamics APM solution to identify actions that are much slower than normal.”

AppDynamics helped improve performance and offered proof

Not only did the AppDynamics APM solution help C9 proactively manage performance, it also provided historical data on performance trends. “From a management point of view, I love the comparison view,” said Thompson.

“About 6 months after I joined, I had to present to our board and technical advisors on stability and performance,” recalled Thompson. “Anecdotally, we all felt that performance had improved, but it was hard to really show. Using the time period comparison of AppDynamics, this provided a very clear visual of the improvement in both response time and reduction of errors.”

Thompson would recommend the AppDynamics solution for businesses like C9. “The reality is, everyone has performance problems no matter how great you are,” said Thompson. “If you're looking for something that's relatively easy to deploy and can deliver value pretty quickly, the AppDynamics APM is definitely a great solution.”